Undoing Nothing

Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance

Paolo Boccagni

$57.95

Paperback

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English

University of California Press
14 October 2025

Refugees & political asylum; Migration, immigration & emigration; Immigration law

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance, or even nothingness? Based on four years of ethnographic research, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers' struggles to produce relevance—that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. Their racialized bodies dwell in their assigned residence while their selves inhabit a suspended translocal space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.

By: Paolo Boccagni
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780520404106
ISBN 10: 0520404106
Pages: 226
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. He has extensively researched and written on migration, home, displacement, absence, and everyday life. He is the author of Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants' Everyday Lives and the editor of the Handbook on Home and Migration.

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Undoing Nothing

Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance

Paolo Boccagni

$57.95

Paperback

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